So this summer I had a boring data monkey job and I spent a lot of time listening to podcasts about everything. Anyways, one of my favorites is wnyc radiolab, which is two guys who cover a whole bunch of topics that are super interesting. Some of the ones they've done are on the concept of time. They go around an interview legitimate scientists and put together their knowledge in a 1 hour show. It's actually pretty sweet.
Point is, one of their shows on time has an interview with Oliver Sacks who is this crazy British neurologist who writes popular books about case studies of patients who reveal something about the way the human brain works. In the episode on time, they talked to him about this story of two patients he had that perceived time totally differently from normal people. But the weird part is, not only do they think time is moving faster or slower, they actually act faster or slower based on that.
So there was this one guy who looked like he never really moved. If you left him alone for a long time you would come back and he would be frozen in a slightly different position. What Sacks did was tape him for a period of time and then watched it and sped it up. It turned out he was just like wiping his nose, but it took him all day! And then there was a girl who had the exact opposite problem. She talked so fast you couldn't understand her; she caught a ball with record-breaking fast reflexes. Everything in the world for her was just moving super slow. And this is all because some mechanism in the brain got messed up. Pretty cool.
Here's the link if you want to listed to the show. Oliver Sacks also has a book or article about this, but I can't find it again. http://www.wnyc.org/shows/
2 comments:
So I was thinking about how we detect time, and I concluded that we must do this through memories - without memories we could not remember anything past and would have no idea that time was passing. So, let's use that idea and apply it here.
Imagine that the normal human stores 20 memories a second (I'm not sure if this is true), so in an hour we would store 60*60*20 =72,000 memories. Now, imagine that this slow man stored only 1,000 memories per hour and that the fast women stored 1 million memories per hour. Thinking about it this way, you can see how your frame of reference would change drastically and alter the way you perceive time passing. It would be as if every twenty memories stored was perceived as a second by all of us, but that second was "slow" for the man described above, "normal" for most humans, and "fast" for the woman described above - that is, relative to most humans' time frame.
Now consider the sloth. Consider the hummingbird. Think about the rate at which plants grow. It seems to me that it would make a LOT of sense that the sloth is not actually lazy and slow but in fact perceives its movements as normal paced and perceives our movement as incredibly fast. This slowing down is likely not very adaptive unless, as in the case of the sloth, they slow down so much that predators operating on faster time scales don't even perceive the sloth's movements and it helps sloths camouflage.
The implication of this for humanity is potentially vast. If we could figure out how to store more memories and thus perceive more in each second that took place, we could do 5X as much in a lifetime and perceive it as being 5X longer! There are bodily limits on how fast we can move our tongue, for example, but I don't think we're anywhere near that capacity.
http://books.google.com/books?id=yUVaOOiFJ1MC&printsec=frontcover&sig=shId07ZcmoASTNX62p8dZJg-YD0
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